Without a Doubt (62 page)

I did not like the way this was going. We had to steer the discussion back to the duplicates.

When Richard Rubin took the stand, Ito allowed Chris to question him, outside the presence of the jury, about the duplicate gloves he’d brought.

Chris reached into a cardboard box and withdrew the duplicate gloves. He strolled back up to the witness stand and placed them in front of Rubin.

“Showing you the gloves that have been marked 372-C,” he said to Rubin. “Are those Aris Isotoner gloves?”

Rubin studied the flawless brown leather gloves resting on the edge of the witness stand.

“They’re Aris gloves, but these are not Aris Light gloves that were like the ones we’re talking about…”

What was going on here?
Hadn’t Chris checked these out when they first came in? We should have learned of this discrepancy—and gotten replacements—months ago.

Chris looked embarrassed. And disappointed. Very disappointed. His moment of glory was slipping away.

I pulled him aside for a private conference.

“What is the fucking deal here?”

“I don’t know,” he told me. He was shifting nervously from foot to foot. “We’ve got to have him put on the gloves.”

“The crime-scene gloves?”

“Shapiro asked to see the [bloody] gloves this morning,” Chris said urgently. “They’ve been practicing with them. If we don’t do it, they will.”

“Who cares?” I said. “Let them. The latex will fuck up the fit and we can tell the jury so. We can’t do this, Chris. Let’s wait and re-call Rubin when we get the right gloves.”

“I’m telling you,” he insisted, “we’ve got to do it now!”

“Let’s let Phil try them on first,” I urged him. Phil’s hands were at least at big as Simpson’s. Maybe if Chris saw the difficulty Phil was having in pulling the gloves over latex, he’d back down. Chris agreed.

Phil put on latex gloves, then pulled the crime-scene gloves over them. It wasn’t easy, but he got them on. They were tight, which in and of itself was not bad. A witness named Brenda Vemich, a Bloomingdale’s buyer who’d authenticated the receipt, had testified that the gloves were supposed to fit “tight and snug.” Like racing gloves.

The problem, of course, was that Phil was a willing subject. He hadn’t splayed his hands like a two-year-old to keep the gloves from being pulled down over his fingers. No one had come up with a way to keep Simpson from pulling those shenanigans.

I turned to Chris. “Don’t do it. I’m warning you.”

“We’ve got to do it,” he insisted.

“Why won’t you fucking listen to me. This is a trap!” My voice was hoarse with tension and anger.

“This is
my
witness,” he snapped. “And I say we have to put those gloves on him now, before they do!”

I couldn’t dissuade him.

We approached the bench.

“. . . We would like to have Mr. Simpson put on the original evidence items,” Chris announced to Ito.

Johnnie, of course, had no objection to this—but he laid down his terms.

“First of all, I don’t want him to do it without having latex gloves on.”

Of course, he didn’t.

Secondly, Johnnie asked Ito not to allow the court cameras to focus on Simpson. I saw Johnnie’s strategy. He knew the jurors would buy his client’s bullshit act, but he wasn’t quite so sure the demonstration would stand up under the scrutiny of more critical observers later on.

Ito refused to allow any special camera arrangements, but he did approve the latex. The jury filed back into the courtroom.

And then it was show time.

“Your Honor,” Chris said, “at this time, the People would ask that Mr. Simpson step forward and try on the glove recovered at Bundy was well as the glove recovered at Rockingham.”

I could hear the discomfort in his voice. He knew he’d gone way out on a limb.

Deirdre Robertson took a box of latex gloves over to the defense table. From where I sat at counsel table, my line of vision was blocked. I couldn’t see Simpson pulling on the latex. I know that Chris walked over to the defense table and handed him the left glove.

Then Johnnie and one of the sheriff’s deputies escorted Simpson over to the jury box, where Simpson began pulling it on. He grimaced and mugged like Cinderella’s stepsister trying to get into that glove.

He got it only part of the way up his wrist.

Chris handed him the right glove. Same performance.

Simpson smiled broadly and displayed his mitts to the jury—and to the camera—as though he were holding up the ball at the goal line. Can you believe this? Here is Simpson wearing gloves splattered with his murdered ex-wife’s blood and he’s grinning ear to ear. Any normal person in these circumstances would cringe.

I felt like dying. But the last thing I wanted was for the jury to see my distress. There was a rule I’d learned as a baby prosecutor: when they’re sticking it to you, act like you couldn’t care less. I felt my expression harden into a mask of indifference.

Chris held up valiantly. He had Simpson pick up one of the felt-tip pens on counsel’s table and demonstrate how he could have held a knife. He then had Simpson make stabbing motions. It was a brave recovery. I gave him credit for that.

When the demonstration was finally over, Simpson casually snapped the gloves off. And I thought to myself,
If they were so hard to get on, why are they so easy to get off, Sparky?
At that point, he looked directly at me, as though he expected me to take them from him. I didn’t move a muscle. I met his gaze without blinking. After a few seconds, he dropped the gloves on the table in front of me and moved on.

I looked down at the bloody, weathered leather, and I said to myself,
That’s it. We just lost the case
.

Afterward, I went out of my way to avoid riding the elevator with Chris. I just wasn’t ready to face him. Upstairs, I found Brian sitting in Bill’s office. His chair was swiveled toward the television. When I walked in, he swung around to look at me. His face was filled with pity.

“You saw it?” I asked, despondent.

“What happened?” Brian asked. “Why’d he do it?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I just don’t know.”

I paused for a moment, then said, “I’ll go talk to him now.”

In his own memoir Chris would write that when he arrived upstairs that afternoon, his colleagues shunned him. Perhaps that’s the way he remembered it but it wasn’t so. His office was crowded with people: Richard Rubin; Phil; one of the D.A. investigators, Mike Stevens. There was also a handful of law clerks, all offering sympathy and suggestions for how we could pull ourselves out of this nosedive. When I walked in, the conversation stopped. Chris looked down. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was suffering too much and I found, to my dismay, that I was too drained, too devastated, to reach out to him and offer him any comfort.

CAR TAPE.
Today is June
. . .
what is it? June sixteenth. To me it felt like we lost the case yesterday. It was that bad. I’m not gonna say that to Chris or anybody else, but
. . .
I don’t know if we can recover. It’s so sad because we were on such a roll. I mean, for once we were really killing them. And here we are, back at square one again, [on the] fucking defensive
. . . .

I felt desperately sorry for Chris. He was so dejected after the glove incident. But I do think it served as a wake-up call for him. You’ve got to think out carefully every move before you make it. I don’t think he fully realized the responsibility we had resting on our shoulders until June 15. He grew up a lot that day. And he came fighting back.

Chris and Richard Rubin, who turned out to be a brick throughout all of this, kept pressure on the Aris people to search their inventories until they came up with the right goddamned gloves—the ones they should have sent us in the first place. Chris recalled Rubin to the witness stand to have him authenticate the new pair. They were, at last, exact duplicates.

Richard testified that the gloves in their original condition would “easily” go over hands the size of Mr. Simpson’s. When gloves have been exposed to repeated dampness and extremes of heat and cold, however, they can shrink as much as 15 percent.

While Chris continued his questioning, I went over to the phone on the bailiff’s desk to call Brian.

“It looks like a ‘go’ to me,” I told him.

“Tell him to do it,” Brian said.

I passed a note to Chris, who stalled. I could see his confidence faltering.

“Come on, Chris. Do it,” I whispered. “It’s going to work this time.”

And it did. This time, when Simpson tried on the gloves, they fit, you should pardon the expression, like a glove.

In the days and weeks that followed, we got literally thousands of faxes, phone calls, and letters with explanations of why the gloves hadn’t fit. We also received a dozen photographs of Simpson wearing Aris Leather Lights. Not just the brown ones, like the ones we had in evidence, but a photo of Simpson wearing a pair of black Aris Lights that, I surmised, was the second pair that Nicole had purchased at Bloomingdale’s. One photo showed Simpson wearing both the brown gloves and a muffler, which I also suspected—but could not prove—was the one Nicole had bought him for Christmas 1990.

I wanted these pictures entered into the record during our rebuttal case. But that meant that we had to check out each one of them. We couldn’t risk putting on a fake. And so I interviewed each of the photographers, most of them amateurs who had just happened to snap a photo at the right moment. I wanted to showcase these photos as effectively as possible. The display shouldn’t be slick, I decided; it should be spare and homespun. So instead of the glitzy graphics we’d used throughout the trial, I set a blank board on the easel. Then I called the photographers one by one to tape his or her photo to the board. Soon the board was filled with photos of Simpson’s gloves. Photos taken by regular folks who’d caught Simpson’s glove act—and didn’t buy it. But what about those “regular folks” on the jury? Would they?

CAR TAPE.
June 29. I am feeling more rested today. I got myself to bed early, which is a first
. . . .
Chris and I are starting to get friendlier. Boy, things have been tense since that glove debacle… . I also jettisoned any more domestic violence witnesses. He was pissed off about that too
. . . .
It just doesn’t fit anymore. All that stuff is out of context now. Chris is really pissed at me, saying I’m not consulting him anymore and cutting him out of the case
. . . . [
But] we need to go for the end of the case in a real strong, clean way
.

This one was my call. The way to go out, I decided, was on hard, irrefutable physical evidence. I wanted the one-two punch of our footprint and hair experts, who came packing dynamite.

Investigators at the Bundy crime scene, of course, had found a set of bloody footprints leading away from the bodies toward the back alley. The pattern left by the killer’s sole was a waffle of “S”-shaped squiggles. We sent photos of the prints to the FBI lab, where they landed on the desk of Special Agent Bill Bodziak, the Bureau’s footwear and tread expert. Bodziak couldn’t locate the pattern in his computerized files of prints, so he went, quite literally, to the ends of the earth to identify them. He traveled to a little factory town in Italy, where he found the very mold that had made the so-called Silga sole. The Silgas had been used in a limited-edition Bruno Magli loafer. It was those rare Silgas that left the bloody prints at Bundy.

We found no Bruno Maglis among the shoes seized at Rockingham. We could never find a receipt for the purchase of any, either. And, of course, we had no photographs. It’s worth mentioning here that shortly after the verdict, the first of many photos would surface showing Simpson wearing the very shoes Bodziak had identified. Later, during depositions at his civil trial, Simpson would deny ever owning a pair of those “ugly-ass shoes”—a line that summoned up an assortment of shoeshine men and sports photographers offering shots of Simpson wearing these very shoes.

Permit me one question. Where were all these civic-minded photographers with their glossies of the Juice sporting Bruno Maglis when the criminal trial was going on? Watching the Weather Channel?

We may not have had photos of the defendant in his Bruno Mags, but we did have strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that he’d owned the pair that made the bloody prints. For one thing, they were a size 12, the size that Simpson wore. This was significant, Bodziak told us, because only 9 percent of the men in North America wear a size 12. Most of them are between six feet and six feet four inches tall. Simpson was six feet two. Moreover, the shoes cost $160 a pair. Your average burglar wouldn’t be wearing them to pull a caper. The price alone spoke volumes about the suspect. He’s the same type of guy who wears cashmere-lined gloves. And of
those
, we had pictures.

Bodziak explained to the court how he’d examined Nicole’s black dress and found an “impression” on the “center front.” Then Hank directed his attention to an autopsy photo showing what appeared to be a heel print on Nicole’s back. Although Bodziak couldn’t positively identify the prints, he said neither was inconsistent with the Silga soles. His testimony conjured up a chilling image: Simpson planting his foot on Nicole’s chest to make the first cut, then stepping on her back and pulling her head back by the hair to deliver the cut that nearly decapitated her.

Equally damning, Bodziak had determined that the bloody shoe print on the driver’s side of the Bronco showed what looked like “S”-shaped squiggles—a particular characteristic of the Bruno Maglis.

We had suspicions that the defense team was scouring crime-scene photos to come up with something—anything—that could be construed as the footprint of a second killer.

“Mr. Bodziak,” Hank asked, “based upon your analysis of all of the items that we’ve discussed today, was there any indication that more than one pair of shoes were involved in this crime?”

“No,” the witness answered, “there was not.”

It fell to Lee Bailey to try and rattle Bodziak on cross. But Bailey, whose abilities served him so well in cross-examining cops and law enforcement personnel, was woefully out of his depth when it came to the scientific evidence.